On February 11, 2013, someone hacked into the Emergency Alert Systems of at least five TV stations and broadcast a message warning viewers that "the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living." KRTV in Great Falls, Montana, was first. WKBT-DT in La Crosse, Wisconsin, followed. Then WBUP and WNMU in Marquette, Michigan, and KENW in Portales, New Mexico.
The hack worked because the stations had never changed the factory default passwords on their Emergency Alert equipment — passwords listed in publicly available user manuals. The audio itself came from a zombie apocalypse soundbite uploaded to YouTube in 2008. The attackers assembled the whole thing from off-the-shelf components: manufacturer documentation plus a five-year-old internet video.
The FCC and FEMA responded by ordering all EAS operators to change their passwords. The perpetrators were never identified or caught.
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